All students are required to take one course in each of six core areas, most of which can be fulfilled by one of several possible courses. These areas and some potential courses that could meet the requirement are listed below. Students who arrive with a Masters degree are often allowed to place out of one or more of these courses, depending on their background.

The required core sequence is designed to introduce students to the major issues in the interpretation of human society and culture, from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes approaches from anthropology, philosophy, literature, religion, and psychoanalysis. Though we don’t require that the students take the core courses in any particular order, with the exception that they begin with HMSC 201, we expect that students will integrate the various concerns and conversations that have infused the human sciences in the last 15 years. In particular, we aim for students to gain:

1. A knowledge of the history of the development of theories and methods for analyzing human culture and society, from the classical period to the 20^th century.
2. A deeper and more specialized sense of the major intellectual debates in three areas: a) the ways in which the acquisition and possession of language shapes human experience; b) the problem of historical knowledge — esp. debates about the possibility of empirical or objective truth; c) the relationship between culture and society, or art and social life.
3. The ability to use this information in the analysis of particular texts or artifacts.